A message from George Osborne MP, Shadow Chancellor

In less than two months' time we have the chance to vote for change in the European and county elections. 

Wednesday will be a day of reckoning.  In what could be the last Budget before a general election, we will see the full consequences of Gordon Brown's decade of irresponsibility.

We will be told that the recession will be longer and more painful than Alistair Darling predicted in his Pre-Budget Report in just November.  We will discover that the public finances are in an even worse condition than the Government predicted.  We will see that Labour's answer to this recession is more debt and higher taxes - exactly the things that left us so badly prepared for the recession in the first place.

Not for the first time, it will take a Conservative government to get us out of Labour's mess.  We offer a different route map to economic recovery, based on savings and investment not borrowing and debt. We will build a new low-carbon, high-skilled, productive and balanced economy that will be the engine of sustainable growth for years to come. And we will reform the public finances and system of financial regulation so that no Labour Government is able to bankrupt us again.  The bulk of the strain must be borne by spending restraint.  We shouldn't be over-taxed to pay for Labour's over-spending.

That is why we desperately need change.  The chance to vote for change in a general election might be a year away, but we can vote for change in the European and county elections on 4 June.